The workplace has to be comfortable for employees. If employees don’t trust each other and their leadership, their productivity drops. Research shows that 45% of workers believe that the lack of trust in the workplace affects their performance. When there is no trust between coworkers, it’s difficult to achieve goals. If you don’t have trust, there is no mutual respect, and people also lack communication.
Employees are wasting their time because of the lack of communication. Instead of achieving a goal within a week, they spend a month to receive positive results. In the worst-case scenario, the goal is not even reached. That is why it’s so essential to build trust within the workplace. Employees have to trust their leaders, and in the decisions they make since the company won’t be able to achieve progress. And all employees have to feel comfortable in the workplace to be able to work productively.
Reason for Lack of Trust
There are several factors that affect the working environment negatively:
Unequal Opportunities
Unequal opportunity to get promoted or to receive a higher payment. This is the case why some employees lose trust in their leadership. Unequal rights of different workers affect not only the leadership-employees relationships, but also it ruins the trust between coworkers. If they see that someone got a raise for no reasons, they won’t trust each other and will compete to get a raise. But such activity will affect the progress of the company.
Weak Leadership
In this case, weak means when a leader is putting his interests over the group’s gain. When your leader is interested in achieving his goals to get promoted, why should you trust him?
High Turnover Within the Workplace
If new employees come and go within a short period, at first, you think that’s because they don’t like the job. But if it’s happening regularly, employees ask themselves – what is wrong with the company. That is the reason why people quit and start looking for another job.
Lack of Sharing
When people stop sharing useful information to gain personal benefits over the team workers, the company is starting to regress. Employees who don’t share their thoughts, opinions, ideas and important information can’t even be considered as a team. Those are separate workers who care only about personal gain. Of course, such an attitude affects the overall progress of a company or a single department.
How to Build Healthy Relationships with Coworkers
It is obvious that such an environment will ruin the trust within the workplace. It would be difficult to achieve mutual goals since everyone will be interested in personal benefits rather than in the overall progress. The research made by some specialist shows that people who work in a healthy environment, and trust each other, perform their work better. They come each day to do their jobs, and they are proud of their company and what they are doing.
If an employee wakes up each day and he is miserable since he has to work in an office where people don’t respect each other and distrust one another, something is wrong. It’s also very important for the employees to spend some time to build healthy relationships with their coworkers. Here are some tips on how to do that:
Communicate
Spend at least several minutes a day to communicate with your coworkers. Invite someone for a cup of coffee or lunch during the break. You can also add your coworkers as friends in a social network and engage with them.
Show Appreciation
Show appreciation if someone helps you out and do the same in return.
Stay Positive
Be positive since it attracts people. People prefer communication with positive people over communication with those who always sees negative things in everything.
Create Boundaries
Create boundaries – friendship is good, but not when it affects your productivity. Try to manage your time, and you have to know precisely how much time you can spend with your colleague. The rest you need to devote to your job.
How to Build Trust
If you are concerned about the environment in your company, it’s best to improve it by building trust. It’s not a short-term process, and you have to be patient. If you are a leader of the department, you can always organize a team-building event which will help in achieving your main goal. But if you are an employee and you are worried about the environment in your department or company overall, you are not in charge, and building trust might be more difficult. There are several ways to improve the current situation:
Integrity and Transparency
As it was mentioned above, when people don’t share important information, there is no progress. Each worker has his task, and it’s important that they share useful data. If they don’t do that, they are performing badly, which leads to a regress. Try showing your colleagues a good example by sharing information – at least they will start trusting you.
Good Leadership Encourages
If you are in charge of a department or of several employees, you need to understand the difference between giving orders and encouraging people to do their jobs well. For instance, if someone is performing well, don’t forget to encourage him, say at least several words about his performance. When people receive positive feedback, they are willing to perform even better. If someone has made a mistake, you must point it, but be polite.
Be a Good Example
It doesn’t matter whether a person is an employee or he is in charge, everyone has to perform well. Everyone makes mistakes, but only conscious and successful people admit them. Don’t try to transfer the blame. Admit your fault and fix the problem. If this will become a tradition, the overall productivity of a department or even the whole company will be increased.
Different researches had been made to find out about the impact of mistrust. For instance, employees who work in a healthy environment and trust each other state, that they feel less stressed. Overall, they experience 74% less stress than employees who work in an unhealthy environment. Of course, such a factor positively affects overall productivity. That is why building trust is essential.
